A change to air traffic regulations

A commercial pilot friend of mind told be about a change in the aircraft regulations having to due with the course and altitude. The old rule was for air traffic flying in different directions was there was suppose to be a 2,000 ft 'buffer' zone to prevent aircraft from colliding, now with a rule change they only have 1,000ft, the buffer zone has been cut in half. At the speeds jets travel 1,000 ft gives them just a few seconds to react and it is not uncommon for air traffic to wander off their planned course and often souding the approaching object alarm. There is concern that this new rule greatly increases the likelyhood of a collision and the software that warns of an approacing object had to be changed because with the new rule in affect it would be constantly going off.

Why was this change made? Is there just more air traffic and it made to make more room in the air?

Also the military is exempt from these rules and unlike everyone else does not have to file a course, which I can see why in most cases but they have to be a concern because they can literally pop up from no where and often times are being flown by student pilots with little hours in the air and a record of poor flying, i.e. Top Gun attitude. Many professional pilots call them "militards" for a reason, many do end up crashing.

Back to the topic, what's the deal with the new regulations?



***im not sure where this topic belongs, so MODs feel free to move it if needed***

[edit on 10-3-2005 by jrod]

The new regs were made, as far as I know, to increase the amount of traffic a given flight level can take.

As for military flights, they arent restricted BUT in Europe, commercial traffic has designated corridors that they can use, and the military has massive areas of airspace reserved for them. This is why when you fly across Europe, you take a haphazard route, because you arefollowing paths rather than going from point A to point B. Not sure how this is arranged in the US.

Not everyone has to enter a flight plan. You can take an aircraft up, and providing you stay out of the commercial routes and the military zones, you can fly any which way you want. There was a recent issue with this in the UK, because Easyjet flys out of a couple of airports in the North of the UK which are in uncontrolled airspace, and this has caused issues when the passenger jets try and join the normal stream - noones controlling them, so noones looking out for them and the chance of collision is higher than normal. There was also an issue with military jets and gliders sharing the same airspace - there was a near miss last year.

The reduced vertical separation minimums has changed for a number of reasons.:

1) the "old" 2000' rule, i.e., 2000 vertical above 29,000 in CONUS original was developed when aircraft altimeters were not as accurate as they are today.

2) the demand for airspace use in CONUS is overtaxing the system. You can only put so many birds in a chunk of airspace at a given time.

Any aircraft, civilian or military operating within CONUS at or above 18,000 is required to be on an Instrument Flight Rules flight plan. They can not just up and fly around. Even the SR-71 when it used to flight operational missions within CONUS airspace was on a flight plan. Military aircraft will typically fly route of flight identified by fix-radial-distance from a given ground based navigational aid, even if they are using GPS or other systems for actual navigation. I only state all this based upon 25 years of military and civilian air traffic control experience.